John Brunner - The Whole Man

Aloud, Howson objected, “So what? Prothrombin works on me — the cuts I got when you picked me up healed fast enough once the scabs had formed.”

Singh exchanged a glance with his companions. Before he could speak again, Howson had caught on to what was in the big Indian’s mind.

‘No?” he whispered.

“No. I’m sorry, Gerry. Those cuts in fact healed at barely half the rate you’d expect in a healthy person. And anything much more serious than a cut — say a broken bone — will probably never heal at all. Yet paradoxically this is what has made you the most promising novice telepathist to come to our notice since Ilse Kronstadt. Let me make that clear.”

He held up the paper from the file so that Howson could see it. It was a large black-and-white schematic representation of a human brain. At the base of the cortex, a small red arrow had been inked in.

“You’ve probably picked up most of what I have to tell you,” he said. “As Danny pointed out when you first met, you need never again fail to understand what’s being done to you and why. But I’ll go over it, if you don’t mind — not being a telepathist myself, I organize words better than universalized concepts.”

Howson nodded, staring with aching misery at the drawing.

“Information is stored in the brain rather casually,” Singh went on. “There’s so much spare capacity, you see. But there are certain areas where particular data are normally concentrated, and what we call ‘body image’ — a sort of reference standard of the condition of the body — is kept where that arrow’s marked. A great deal of the data required for healing is right down on the cellular level, naturally, but in your case that mechanism’s faulty — witness your hemophilia. One could get around that with the aid of artificial stimulation of your body image centre, but for this paradox I mentioned.”

He changed the drawing for another, showing the brain from below, also bearing a red arrow.

“Now here’s a typical average brain — like mine or Christine’s. The red arrow points to a group of cells called the organ of Funck. It’s so small its very existence was overlooked until the first telepathists were discovered. In my brain, for instance, it consists of about a hundred cells, not much different from their neighbors. You’ll note its location!’

Again he extracted a fresh item from the folder. This one was a large X-ray transparency, the whitish outline of a skull with jaw and neck vertebrae.

“You’ll remember we took X-rays of your head, Gerry, after giving you a radio-opaque substance which selectively — ah — ‘stains’ cells in the organ of Funck. Take a look at the result.”

Howson gazed numbly at the picture.

“That whitish mass at the base of the brain,” Singh said. “It’s your organ of Funck. It’s the largest, by almost twenty per cent, that I’ve ever seen. Potentially you have the most powerful telepathic faculty in the world, because that’s the organ which resonates with impulses in other nervous systems. You are capable of coping with an amount of information that staggers the mind.”

“And it’s made me a cripple,” Howson said.

“Yes.” Slowly, Singh put the picture away. “Yes, Gerry. It’s taken over the space normally occupied by body image, and as a result we can do nothing to mend your body. Any operation big enough to help you would also be big enough to kill you.”

“Well, Danny?” said Singh when they had returned to his office. The telepathist, whose specialty was the discovery and training of new members of his kind, slowly shook his head.

“He has no reason to co-operate,” he said. “My God, do you blame him? Think about his plight! His face, every time he looks in the mirror — like an idiot child about to vomit! What compensation is it after twenty years of that to become a telepathist? I’ve picked out things from his mind…” He paused, swallowing hard.

“Consider! He was first overheard from orbit, by a space communicator, so potentially his ‘voice’ is the loudest in history. But his real voice has never broken — he has this silly castrato pipe! He never lost his milk-teeth, for God’s sake—just as well, in view of his hemophilia, but think what that did to his psyche. It takes him three months to grow enough hair to visit the barber. He’s never even begun to have a beard. As to sexuality, he’s acquired superficial attitudes and never experienced the emotions; what that’ll do to him the first time he contacts someone with a bad sexual problem, God knows.”

“Can we tackle that?” Singh suggested.

“Out of the question!” Waldemar snapped. “You can’t seriously want to make his condition worse — and believe me, you would, if you made him sexually competent with hormones and left him in this malformed body. Mark you, I’m not sure you’d succeed; his body image is so far from normal I daren’t guess whether he can respond to hormones or not.”

“What I was thinking was—” put in Christine Bakwa, and broke off. Waldemar glanced at her.

“You were wondering if I could take his mind apart and put it together again, him? To clear out this terrible jealousy he’s conceived for his girl-friend?’

“Yes, I was.” The neurologist made a vague gesture. “I see why he’s so resentful — I mean, fitting her up with speech and hearing was so easy he must subconsciously disbelieve that helping him is impossible, and the very fact that he made it a condition of coming with you suggests that he’s got high empathy.”

“Granted,” Waldemar agreed. “Only-he’s powerful.”

“I thought you managed to control him when you first located him.”

“Briefly. I’d never have got in at all but that he was suffering terribly from the knowledge that he’d caused the pain of the men in the “copter which crashed. And he broke my hold eventually. No, in cold blood he could resist any attempt made to interfere with his mind, and I’m not sure the telepathist who attempted it would retain his sanity.”

There was a hollow silence. It was broken by a soft buzz from a phone on Singh’s desk. Heavily he moved to depress the attention switch.

“Yes?”

“Mr Hemmikaini is here for you, Dr. Singh,” a voice reported.

“Oh—! Oh, very well. Send him up.’ Singh let go the switch and glanced at his companions. “That’s one of the Special Assistants to the UN Secretary General coming in. I guess I have to worry about what he wants rather than spending all my time thinking of Howson. But with the potential Howson represents…”

Getting to his feet, Waldemar finished the sentence for him. “One could wish,” he muttered, “that the rest of the damned world would stop nagging at us for a few days and let us get through the wall of his resentment! Somebody ought to work it out some time — whether we telepathists have caused more bother than we’ve saved.”

He gave Singh a crooked grin and went out.

Hemmikaini was a large, round-faced man with fair hair cut extremely short and very pink skin. He looked like what he was — a successful and dedicated executive. It was only the nature of his duties that was unusual.

After giving Singh a plump-fingered hand and setting his black portfolio on the corner of the desk, he dropped into a chair and leaned back.

“Well, you know why I’m here, Dr. Singh. You also know that time is running short, so I’ll waste none of it on fiddling courtesies. We have a problem. We have computer solutions to indicate that we need someone with talents of the order possessed by Ilse Kronstadt. Ergo, we need her — she’s unique. Yet our request for the release of her services, made to the director in chief here, was countered by the suggestion that somebody should come and talk to you. Why?’